Gender, Vice, and the Political Imaginary in Postrevolutionary France: Reinterpreting the
Failure of the July Monarchy, 1830–1848

JO BURR MARGADANT

The power of the media to shape our own political perceptions doubtless explains in part the recent flurry of scholarly works that examine representations of royalty in the popular press, beginning as early as the sixteenth century. How did royal figures fare, these studies ask, once political pamphlets, caricatures, and the serial press turned politics into an imagined world, onto which men and women, variously positioned in the social order, might fasten fears, hatreds, and some notion of themselves? Robert Darnton set the stage for such inquiries years ago with his pathbreaking study of the scabrous publications of the "low enlightenment" in eighteenth-century Paris. Following in his wake but armed with new concerns, several historians have recently reshaped investigations of the fate of monarchy in France and England by focusing on gendered imagery in battles over royalty.1 No one has turned that scholarly optic yet on the failed monarchical experiments of postrevolutionary France. The purpose of this article is to offer a new interpretation of the failure of a French constitutional monarchy by examining the hopelessly contradictory symbolic order that a French royal family had to embody after 1830. The vulnerability of constitutional monarchy in France owed its origins, the analysis argues, to particular features of the gendered political imaginary of the French elite. That judgment leads naturally in the conclusion to a brief comparison with the very different fate of Britain's constitutional monarchy in the nineteenth century.	1
Frontispiece: Design by Auguste Bouquet, lithograph by Becquet (6, rue Furstemberg), "La poire et ses pépins" (The Pear and Its Seeds), La caricature, no. 139, plate 289 (July 4, 1833).
To link the differing fates of constitutional monarchy in nineteenth-century France and England to the gendered political imaginary of their publics situates the argument in a much larger debate about historical causation. The analysis presented here rejects the classic definition of a public sphere of political action and opinion, clearly separate in its concerns and fantasies from the intimate relations of private life, and substitutes instead a conceptual approach that brings the two together and suggests, thereby, why publicity about a political leader's purported "vices" can arouse politically dangerous responses in the general public.2 In American politics, the most obvious recent victims of this phenomenon are Bill and Hillary Clinton. But even long-dead political icons like Thomas Jefferson raise public ire when publicity about their private lives touches morally sensitive areas in contemporary social life.3 How much more powerful, then, might be the emotional response to adverse publicity about a reigning monarch whose intimate and familial relations were a public concern by definition and whose removal from the throne depended on death or revolution? Sexual secrets have often figured in cases of highly charged political scandals in the past, but other "vices" have elicited equally volatile responses in publics attuned to different moral issues in their personal lives. The idea of exploring links between the morally charged universe of private experience, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, critiques of political leaders and the political order they uphold has given rise in recent years to strikingly new interpretations of the origins of mass political movements as diverse as Chartism in England and revolution in France.4 What they also have suggested are some of the many different ways that gender, an explicit ordering feature of the moral universe of intimate relations, can shape the rhetoric of politics and denunciation in public life as well. This article applies that scholarly insight to the political battles taking place in Paris in the 1830s and 1840s, where it uncovers powerfully and variously gendered morality tales about the monarch and his family that were driving France toward revolution once again.	2
As those familiar with French history know, the struggle opened by the French Revolution between republicans and monarchists did not close definitively until the later 1870s, when the majority of the French electorate finally embraced the Third Republic. During that long republican gestation, the one serious attempt to combine monarchy with liberal governing institutions modeled after England occurred under King Louis-Philippe, who assumed his royal title in 1830 through a legislative act after a popular insurrection in Paris overthrew his reactionary Bourbon cousin, Charles X. Eighteen years later, following nearly as many years of relentless insults in the press aimed directly or indirectly at the king, the July Monarchy collapsed in another popular insurrection, tarred with ignominy in the public eye.	3
Once so easily explained as the consequence of economic deprivation, a corrupt political elite, and a despised and venal monarch, the Revolution of 1848 shares today something of the mystery for historians that it held at the time for the exiled Louis-Philippe. Much outstanding recent work on Orléanist politics has focused on the ways defenders of the monarchy challenged accusations by their detractors.5 The brilliance now recognized in the ideas articulated by the monarchy's defenders and the symbolic gestures orchestrated by the king can only leave us wondering why the regime could not convince the public, especially when France experienced an economic takeoff in the 1840s, as David Pinkney has shown.6 Even the old theory about a popular revolution by an impoverished Parisian populace recovering from two years of high bread prices and recession rings strangely hollow. Pierre Rosanvallon has recently argued that nothing either the Bourbons or Louis-Philippe might have done would have implanted constitutional monarchy, since the French had no tradition of individual rights needing protection from the state to justify giving power to a king.7 Yet Rosanvallon joins the chorus of historians mystified by the Revolution of 1848 itself.8 Are we to conclude with Gordon Wright that the overthrow of Louis-Philippe was a historical accident, a simple failure of royal nerve?9	4
That interpretation cannot explain, unfortunately, the widely sensed fragility of the regime in the 1840s. Nor can it account for the vicious treatment of the king and members of his family by the press. It has long been understood that a campaign of insults and denunciations by a ferociously hostile press brought the king into insurmountable disrepute early in his reign, but his vulnerability to such attacks was generally assumed to lie in his own unscrupulous behavior.10 This article sets out to reinterpret the power of those attacks from two perspectives previously unexamined. The first reflects on the glaring absence of familial metaphors in the political language defending the regime that might have legitimated the presence of a royal family. Lynn Hunt and Sarah Hanley have recently insisted that the French monarchy of the Old Regime, like other European monarchies in the eighteenth century, relied on family metaphors to justify royal authority in the public imagination as much as in the body of the law.11 This essay turns the argument around to ask what happened to the monarchy when the discourse of public life substituted for royal paternalism an imagined public sphere based on individual merit. The effect, I argue here, could only devastate the claims of royal dynasties. Once a meritocratic rhetoric triumphed after 1830 in the language of ambition and public service, the cultural scaffolding necessary for a dynastic regime to survive from one generation to the next in France collapsed. Much of the abuse leveled at the king and royal family by the opposition press, together with their own strategies for countering charges of undeserved privileges, has its origin in this fundamental contradiction.	5
Still, to point out the incongruity between dynasticism and meritocracy does not explain the venom of attacks against the king or the symbolic repertoire used by his opponents to destroy his reputation. That requires a familiarity with the code of honor that informed the political battles and public life in general during the regime. Two recent studies of male honor in this period among the elite of urban France by Robert Nye and William Reddy greatly advance our understanding of those attacks.12 Nye establishes what bourgeois honor required of elite men and women in the nineteenth century, while Reddy clarifies why the journalistic culture of the elite under the July Monarchy was so vicious. Taken together, these two perceptive cultural studies offer up a gendered code for reading the symbolic weapons that eventually destroyed Louis-Philippe's good name. Nonetheless, it is only in following this war of symbols over time and in syncopation with major political events that we finally can unravel the strange finale to the reign of Louis-Philippe: a good man with an exemplary family life, scourged in the press as a liar, thief, and murderer; a man so hated by the populace of Paris that rampaging crowds in 1848 destroyed his family's personal belongings in the Tuileries Palace, while bands of revolutionary arsonists burned his private home in Neuilly to the ground.	6
The evidential basis for this analysis combines two sorts of representations of the royal family. On the one hand are denunciations by their detractors in the opposition press. These include dozens of caricatures mocking or otherwise attacking the king and sometimes members of the royal family, numerous hostile articles in the periodical and daily press, and satirical pamphlets that appeared sporadically throughout the regime.13 From this empirical data, I have chosen representative images to suggest how over the course of the first five years of the regime, Louis-Philippe mutated in hostile caricatures from a figure of immense ridicule into a violent, manipulative moral monster, setting the stage for a popular anger so intense it placed the very lives of the royal family at risk. Tracing the role assigned by the republican press to unmistakably gendered images exposes a gradual masculinization of the symbolic language in which republicans cast their political struggle. All sides would come to emulate this language—all sides, that is, except the populace of Paris.14 The surprising result of a gendered interpretation of the images attacking the king and royal family unavoidably reopens the question of what precisely in the political imaginary of the people of Paris made it possible to call them to the barricades in 1848.	7
On the other hand, I rely on a variety of other sources, ranging from official ceremonies and portraits, spontaneous gestures by members of the royal family in the public eye, and their own private correspondence, to examine changes in how the royal family presented itself in response to opponents' hostile readings of their acts and motives.15 The paradox elicited from this second set of evidence reveals a royal strategy that, far from strengthening the royal family's claim to represent the nation, manifested the inherent contradictions in a meritocratic political culture of representing the nation through a single family. A comparison with the English case makes the point still more persuasive, while at the same time suggesting that the real Achilles' heel of constitutional monarchy under any royal family in France lay in the peculiar position assigned under a "bourgeois" monarchy to the queen. To understand how the political imagination of the French elite militated against royal representations of the nation, however, we need first to understand the honor code operating within this same elite.16	8
From the outset of the July Monarchy, partisans and enemies alike used the term "bourgeois" to characterize the new regime. In his study of masculinity and male codes of honor, Nye argues that this label had less to do with precise social origins than with a set of values among urban elites in nineteenth-century France that associated male honor with individual achievement.17 The idea dated to the Old Regime, when bourgeois sons had to acquire public honor individually through personal effort and success, while noble men, who were born with honor, merely felt obliged never to lose it through a dishonorable act. By the nineteenth century, bourgeois honorability had developed specifically gendered features also. Physical bravery, courtesy toward other men, and gallantry toward women persisted from an earlier noble version of male honor, but bourgeois masculinity now placed men and women in a polarity of complementarity and difference. Honorable men could not resemble women, but they also had to seem attractive to them.18 Moreover, honor for a man depended on the sexual honor of the women under his control, which he was bound to defend from public insult. Throughout the July Monarchy, the campaign of insults directed against the king and royal family presumed an audience familiar with this vocabulary of "bourgeois" honor and dishonor.	9
Both Nye and Reddy attribute the verbal and physical violence of French male elites in postrevolutionary France to the importance of individual honor in their imagined meritocratic social universe. In fact, individual merit was not enough to get ahead. Family connections, exchange of favors, and deferential manners were crucial to success, a reality that nobody could honorably admit about himself but everyone imagined explained another's triumphs. The peril for reputations was particularly acute in public life, which required a disinterested exercise of power free of private interest.19 Reddy blames the cynicism of French journalism from the late 1820s through the July Monarchy on journalists' own anxiety about their professional honor. In freelance journalism, financial success (a requirement of family honor) meant writing for intensely politicized papers on opposite sides of the political fence, but professional honor required a disinterested respect for truth. Caught between these incompatible imperatives of professional and familial honor, journalists developed a touchy professional culture, scornful of moral posturing and distrustful of the influence of money in public life.	10
Yet a cultural interpretation of the regime's demise cannot examine only the outlook of the king's detractors, since Louis-Philippe, too, identified his family with a meritocratic, bourgeois code of honor. He really had no other choice. Enthroned by revolution and a legislative act, Louis-Philippe could hardly appeal to blood and birthright to legitimate his throne. Nor had he ever so intended. By accepting power as Louis-Philippe I instead of "Philippe VII," he clearly signaled to the French the beginning of a new dynastic line.20 The problem after 1830, as Rosanvallon rightly sees, was to find a principle on which to base a royal house.21 Louis-Philippe's conundrum was less the newness of his claim than the fact that, after 1830, merit finally triumphed over blood as a legal basis for every public honor except the throne. Although the Charter of 1830 made male primogeniture the basis of the monarchy, elsewhere the principle lacked any legal sanction in either public or civil law. The risk to the regime was not lost on its supporters. Staunch Orléanist defenders argued strenuously in the Chamber of Deputies against abolishing hereditary peerage in the upper house on just those grounds.22 The king resigned himself to this outcome, even though it meant for his potential heirs a never-ending need to prove their claim to represent the nation, not as men with royal blood but rather as outstanding men of honor, exemplars of their sex both as family men and in service to the public.	11
The application of postrevolutionary notions of honor to a royal family presented other difficulties. Conforming to a bourgeois code of honor placed Louis-Philippe the father in an impossible contradiction with Louis-Philippe the king, a paradox that resembled structurally the dilemma faced by freelance journalists. As a good father, he was honor-bound to provide for all his children equally and well, but as king, he was expected to devote his property to the public welfare. His efforts to resolve this dilemma honorably would unleash so fierce a press attack on Louis-Philippe for greed and fraud that, by the end of his reign, caricaturists conjured up a man for whom not even human life took priority over avarice. The attacks in both the legislature and the press occasioned by these contradictions exposed the inherent vulnerability of a bourgeois monarchy. Neither husband of France, as kings had been under the French marital regime government, nor father to his people, as the later Bourbons sought to be, nor a member of the band of brothers invented by republicans in the revolution, this king in his familial role could only be a man like any other, torn between his private interests and his public duties.23 Unavoidably, any act that advanced the royal family's interests risked the charge of defending not the nation but the ambitions of the royal family.	12
This unavoidably private aspect to the public image of the royal family had important repercussions on the position assigned to royal women. Old Regime law had long barred women from the throne of France. Both the Charter of 1814 and the revised Charter of 1830 reiterated that prohibition. Under the Old Regime and during the Bourbon Restoration, however, women from whom a sacred royal heir had issued held a place of honor in representations of the kingdom and the nation; in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, several had even served as regents.24 After the revolution of 1830 denied the sacred status of a king, there remained no clear meaning for a queen. Tracking the fate of Queen Marie-Amélie in representations of the nation, therefore, opens still more vistas on the ineluctable demise of monarchy in France. What we shall discover is a progressive masculinization in the capital and in the press of images of the monarchy. Once politics became a battleground, a bourgeois conception of male and female honor applied to royalty, and a concern for the royal family's physical safety forced the queen to withdraw from public view, leaving the king, supported by his sons, to struggle with his opponents to define the monarchy. But when the queen disappeared from public view, what differentiated this royal father from other heads of households competing in the public sphere for wealth and power? In fact, Marie-Amélie's position was doubly compromising for the royal image, since her presence in the public eye might serve as a reminder of the private nature of this family's relationship to the throne, but her absence could give the same impression.25	13
A political culture enmeshed with notions of male honor did not exclude women at the outset of the July Monarchy, quite the opposite. Early efforts by both supporters and opponents of the regime relied heavily on images of women to represent its essentially good or its vicious nature. The Orléans family adopted a similarly gendered strategy. Highly visible supportive roles for the queen comprised a central part of their initial bid for public favor. Indeed, the kaleidoscope of queenly images paraded before Paris in popular illustrations or by the royal family itself during the first years of the reign offered visual proof that a new era in monarchy had begun. (See Figure 2.)26 On the domestic front, several nights a week, the queen entertained informally at the palace in a frankly bourgeois manner, with the women of the family seated at a table doing handiwork, while the king, standing at the fireplace, conversed on political matters with male guests.27 Drawing on bourgeois manners once again, the queen sometimes strolled on the arm of her husband in fashionable parts of Paris. Furthermore, like any bourgeois mother proud of her sons' achievements, she attended the annual award ceremony at the lycée Henri IV until the youngest of her sons had graduated. Exemplary wife and mother, the queen also performed two civic roles assigned to women. One positioned her iconographically as the necessary female spectator for all ceremonies that celebrated the link between the king, the nation, and the men responsible as soldiers or citizen militia and as lawmakers for defending the regime.28 A second wrote her into celebrations of the July Revolution as comforter for the wounded and benefactor for the daughters of the heroes who had died.29 The official script for narrating the nation to itself, in other words, specifically included a feminine dimension represented by the queen.	14
Figure 2: Lithograph by Alexandre Fragonard, "Le Roi Citoyen et sa famille" (The Royal Citizen and His Family), Collection Portraits, Louis-Philippe, 80C 101283, Estampes, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
Far from being imposed on public life, a feminine presence in the official nation only echoed a view recorded throughout the popular press and on all sides of the political struggle.30 Popular prints commemorating the insurrection of July 1830 showed women caring for the wounded, tossing boulders from their windows, loading guns for men at the barricades, even sometimes replacing fallen insurgents.31 A number of artists, journalists, and workers presented the meaning of the revolution through the body of a woman shot at the Place des Victoires, the first victim of the revolution.32 Victorious insurgents carried one live "heroine of the barricades" into the Palais Royal to present to Marie-Amélie, a marvel that her third son, the adolescent duc de Joinville, promptly recorded in a watercolor.33 Although printmakers stopped depicting women as agents of popular violence within a few weeks of the revolution, they did not disappear from visualizations of the nation.34 Through 1833, the opposition press on both the left and right configured political space with women in it. For Legitimists, accidents born of personality and events made this a necessity since the activists fastened all hope for another Bourbon restoration on an insurrection under the titular helmsmanship of the duchesse de Berry, the widowed mother of the adolescent Bourbon heir in exile. But some of the most implacable enemies of the regime in the republican press, the publishing house of Aubert and the journalist Charles Philipon, who together produced La caricature and Le charivari, two newspapers that specialized in political caricatures, placed women among the imaginary spectators to their campaign of ridicule and derision.35 No matter which side used them, configurations of women into political space permitted favorable reflections on the honor of their men; indeed, with the exception of the duchesse de Berry, that was their transparent purpose.	15
All the same, if supportive wives and daughters could enhance the honor of men in public life, other relationships with women might undermine it. For that reason, through 1833, easily recognizable gendered symbols figured prominently in the repertoire of mockery unleashed by opponents of the monarchy in political caricatures. To decode their contemptuous assault, one need only consider that, since the triumph of a bourgeois definition of masculinity, to dishonor a male opponent in a gendered setting meant presenting him either as an abuser of women or as too much like them. Opposition journalists and artists pursued both lines of attack to withering effect against the king and heir apparent.36 Put simply, which is how political humorists expected jokes to work, the message they imparted at a single glance went this way: a brutal leader who mistreated women had no honor, while a feminized male authority could not defend the nation's interests.	16
Republicans and other critics on the left were particularly well-positioned to attack the king as an abuser of women since iconographic renderings of liberty and the republic, the two principles that they purported to defend, always took the form of women. So could la France, la presse, and la constitution, which were feminine nouns as well. Armed with this plenitude of female glyphs, republican and proto-republican artists regularly moved onto a gendered field of honor in which the opposition press assumed the role of chivalrous protector and Louis-Philippe received the role of unprincipled villain.37 A typical example appeared in the April 1833 La caricature, depicting the king as Bluebeard in the act of murdering La Constitution, while in the background, La Presse leans out her window holding two republican papers, and knights ride to her defense with La République on their banner.38 (See Figure 3.) Legitimists managed to project similarly dishonorable intentions on the king by presenting the arrest and imprisonment of the long-widowed duchesse de Berry as a real-life melodrama, in which her uncle bribed a traitor to reveal her hiding place and then shamelessly dishonored her with the delivery of her doubtless illegitimate child in prison, though she claimed to have secretly remarried. Not surprisingly, attacks on Louis-Philippe as an abuser of women reached a veritable crescendo in 1833.	17
Figure 3: Design by Grandville (J.-I.-I. Gérard) and Bernard-Romain Julien, lithograph by Becquet, "Barbe bleue, blanche et rouge" (Blue, White and Red Beard), in La caricature, no. 127, plate 263 (April 11, 1833). The commentary explained: "'It's Louis-Philippe about to slaughter Constitution . . .' The Press leans out of her tower holding two republican papers, La tribune and Le national. Constitution calls to her: 'Press, my sister, don't you see anyone coming?'—'I see two knights riding at a gallop carrying a banner; it's the banner of the Republic.'"
Still more often, the opposition press derided the masculinity of the king by infantilizing or feminizing his body parts and clothing in ways that spoke directly to the eye. For instance, a caricature might place him up against more virile opponents, a foreign power or the invincible Republic, in the posture of a child.39 (See Figure 4.) Artists for Le charivari and La caricature became exceedingly adept at inventing subtle emasculating signs implying royal impotence even without the visual presence of an enemy. A few such images became, in time, recognized logos for the king. A loosely closed umbrella beside the bulging figure of the king in a culture where an aristocratic ideal of slender manliness lingered on, hinted broadly at Louis-Philippe's unmanly weakness. Soon, just the image of a soft umbrella in a caricature was enough to symbolize his flabby presence.40 The pear, too, which began under Philipon's pen as a caricature of the royal face, evolved quickly into a replacement for the king's entire body, suggesting among other things a woman's profile.41 Sometimes, the pear carried prurient overtones, especially when represented as soft or small, as in a caricature from 1832, "False Gods of Olympus," which presented the king's eldest son and heir to the throne, the duc d'Orléans, as an insipid, scrawny Hercules, holding a little pear to symbolize his genitalia and, hence, the dynasty; while a proud cock, representing France, steps out from under the skirts of the fat and effeminate king, "Jupiter-Louis-Philippe," wearing a toga with an empire waistline.42 (See Figure 5.)	18
Figure 4: Artist unknown, lithograph by Becquet, "Le nouveau Josué" (The New Joshua), Le charivari, no. 323 (October 20, 1833).
Typically, in the first years of the regime, artists who denounced the supposed avarice of the king, an accusation that more than any other would destroy his reputation, also expressed disdain by feminizing his appearance. Here, though, feminizing the king's body, rather than suggesting impotence in public life, implied removing him figuratively from the sphere of the public into the realm of private interest and familial ambition. In 1833, that effort produced a richly suggestive portrait of the king as a poor father begging public funds with a tethered cock, which stood for France, tied to his wrist as a mark of ownership and a loosely folded umbrella in his hand suggesting feminine softness.43 (See Figure 6.) The same year, his entire family, whose members had themselves assumed pear shapes in earlier prints, turned up in Le charivari, seated beside a treasure chest in the center of a softly rotten, giant pear.44 (See Frontispiece.) Decidedly, the royal pear had moved into the home, the fountainhead of all bourgeois ambition.	19
Figure 5: Design by Grandville and Eugène Forest, lithograph by Becquet, "Les faux dieux de l'Olympe" (The False Gods of Olympus), La caricature, no. 98, plates 200–01 (September 20, 1832).
The grounds for complaint over Louis-Philippe's greed present no mystery.45 Under the Restoration Monarchy, he had successfully reclaimed much of his father's private property from before the 1789 revolution and inherited a considerable fortune from his mother. This private fortune, together with several chateaus from his father's princely appanage, which Louis XVIII had restored to him and the legislature eventually confirmed, made the duc d'Orléans by 1830 the richest man in France. On the eve of accepting the throne, to keep his private properties outside the public domain, he placed them in a trust for his children with himself as lifetime beneficiary of the revenues. At the same time, he expected his annual appropriations, or civil list, to be as large as Charles X's (18,000,000 francs), the reinstatement of the Orléans appanage, an income for his heir apparent, and dowries and dowers for his children when they eventually married. After much delay and heated debate, the legislature only conceded a reduced civil list, the appanage less one chateau, and an annual income for his eldest son so as to give him some independence from his father. The question of dowering his children, the law stated, would only arise if the king's private fortune did not cover his expenses. Thus, from the very beginning of the reign, the new monarch's financial strategy and hence his image as father and king straddled public and private spheres.	20
Figure 6: Artist unknown, lithograph by Becquet, "Un pauvre père de famille qui n'a que quelques millions de revenus" (A Poor Father of a Family Who Has an Income of Only a Few Millions), Le charivari, no. 344 (November 10, 1833), série politique 129. Although the commentary reports that the king's "family" are members of the government, readers would have understood that this image, in fact, referred to the king's own family.
Louis-Philippe recognized in these maneuverings no moral conflict that impugned his honor.46 He could not in good conscience disinherit his children, since an unstable monarchy offered no guarantees for their future. Once on the throne, though, he viewed his family as agents of the public whose prestige, munificence, and marital alliances lawmakers should guarantee as proof of their importance to the nation, especially since he himself intended to use the revenues from his children's private trust together with his annual royal income to embellish royal chateaus and palaces in celebration of the glorious past accomplishments of the French. The argument gained little sympathy with the public, once his enemies had published in excruciating and exaggerated detail the extent of his private fortune.47 Significantly, only Legitimist supporters of the exiled Bourbons expressed shock that a king would prevent his private property from entering the public domain. In tacit recognition that the family of a constitutional monarch chosen by the people had an existence apart from the throne, neither supporters of the new monarchy or republicans publicly questioned his right to a private fortune. Following the same logic, however, his opponents protested his demand for more money, more chateaus, and subsidies for his married children by presenting him in the press as an archetypical bourgeois father out to fill his coffers at taxpayers' expense.	21
By 1835, the symbolic trappings of attacks on the king had changed in tone and imagery. When the subject of ridicule was diplomatic relations, infantilizing and feminizing the king remained the weapons of choice. But on domestic issues, Louis-Philippe had gradually metamorphosed in caricatures from a weak and womanish figure into a master trickster and Machiavellian monster who dominated by deception, manipulation, and force. In the process, the pear declined as a metaphor of vice in preference for more masculine signs of depravity that included images of the hypocritical rogue Robert Macaire, a character invented for the stage in 1834 by the actor Frédérick Lemaître, who now entered the repertoire of symbols that evoked the king.48 Significantly, the victims of Macaire's schemes for extracting money from the rich were always gullible male protagonists or women as unscrupulous as himself. The virtuous maiden of popular melodrama disappeared from this theatrical commentary on the hypocrisy of contemporary life as well as from the political caricatures that used it. Somehow, the gendered vocabulary of visual jokes that vilified the king in the early 1830s had lost its purchase.	22
The most obvious reason for this shift in imagery lies in the increasing violence of resistance to the monarchy and the severity of the government's repression. Legal battles with the press had been a constant feature of the regime since 1831.49 By a law of November 29, 1830, any journalist who attacked the dignity and constitutional prerogatives of the king, the order of succession to the throne, or the rights and authority of the legislative chambers was subject to prosecution, and, if found guilty, to substantial fines and several months in prison. Between 1831 and 1834, the government successfully prosecuted 204 cases, but, since it lost another 300 because juries refused to convict, such tactics only encouraged journalists to invent ever more subtle innuendoes for maligning the king and royal family.50 What changed the visual vocabulary in this running battle was the government's crackdown on organized political resistance. The crisis began with a Draconian law on associations in early 1834.51 But the turning point arrived in April and May when the government smashed an uprising by silk workers in Lyons and crushed another revolt shortly afterward in Paris. Deaths, arrests, and jailings, all became directly attributable to Louis-Philippe in images from the opposition press. A caricature by C. J. Traviès in Le charivari of a lumbering, brutal creature with victims piled carelessly on his back, which any regular reader of the paper understood as Louis-Philippe, powerfully expressed this new development.52 (See Figure 7.) Iconographically, the king had turned from an abuser of women into a murderer of men, and politics in the political imaginary of the opposition moved off a multi-gendered field of honor onto a battleground exclusively for men.	23
Figure 7: Design by C. J. Traviès, lithograph by Junca (Passage Sulnier, no. 6), "Personnification du Système le plus doux et le plus humain" (Personification of the Gentlest and Most Humane Government), Le charivari, no. 198 (July 27, 1835).
Republican artists were not alone in representing Louis-Philippe as a murderous monster. Wild theories implicating him in the assassination of the duc de Berry had circulated already in 1820, immediately after the event. In 1832, with the captured duchesse de Berry in prison, the Legitimist press resurrected those suspicions and wove them into a gothic tale of Bourbons martyred by the ambitious Orléans family. The story opened with his father's vote in the Convention in 1793 in favor of executing Louis XVI, included his own alleged conspiracy to assassinate the duc de Berry, and culminated in a plot to murder the duc de Bourbon to prevent him, after the revolution of 1830, from changing his will, which gave the bulk of his fortune to Louis-Philippe's fourth son.53 In 1832, this chronicle of horrors imagined the captive duchesse de Berry as Louis-Philippe's next Bourbon victim. Unavoidably, the ambiguous finale to her imprisonment with the birth of another child eliminated her from the saga of the Orléans villainy. Legitimists, too, were left with a tale of unscrupulous ambition that included only men.	24
This progressive shift toward a masculinized narration of politics by both the Left and Right had stunning consequences for the monarchy, because eventually the royal family would also embrace the masculine lexicon adopted by their enemies, and in so doing, reinforce an interpretation of the public sphere that their opponents would use to undercut them. Arguably, the visual starting point for the erasure of the feminine in republican iconography is Honoré Daumier's celebrated lithograph "Massacre sur la rue Transnonain," which memorialized the most infamous slaughter of the Parisian insurrection of 1834.54 (See Figure 8.) A dead man in his nightshirt, splayed across the body of a child whose nightcap suggests a baby boy, lies near an old man, also shot in cold blood inside their home by government troops. Three generations of males, all positioned in the foreground of the scene with their faces visible, impart the message that only men figure in the civil war that had broken out again in France. The lifeless woman in the shaded background, with just her feet exposed, lacks any position in the battle. In Daumier's version, she becomes the least consequential victim of a vicious regime that massacres unarmed civilians. In 1834, this way of indicting the regime did not exhaust interpretations that lithographers placed on the event. At least one anonymous artist returned to the shaming device of 1830 in which the moral depravity of the regime is read through an innocent women's body.55 (See Figure 9.) But in the final year before a new press law in September 1835 introduced pre-publication censorship for caricatures, forcing Le charivari and La caricature to fold, a female presence lost evocative power in images ridiculing and dishonoring the regime. Even La République configured as a woman faded as a rhetorical call to arms for men who saw violent confrontation between the government and themselves as the only way to defend the nation's interests.	25
Figure 8: Honoré Daumier, "Massacre sur la rue Transnonain," Collection Histoire de France, July 1834, Qb1 M 112444, Estampes, BNF.
Undoubtedly, the eclipse of the duchesse de Berry as a political icon affected the political imagination of all factions in subtle ways. Certainly, for all sides, repeated fines and imprisonments dealt out to opposition journalists by a beleaguered government dramatized repression as a struggle pitting men against each other. Among republicans, another explanation for the masculinization of the political imaginary lies in the secret men's societies that took the radical opposition underground for the remainder of the monarchy's existence. From that conspiratorial perspective, the struggle to overturn the regime meant a continuous clash between men that only incidently and accidently victimized women. But the driving force behind this progressive shift toward a masculinized narration of politics by both the Left and Right was the elite's own pervasive code of honor as it had evolved in postrevolutionary France. According to that code, once male rivalry turned violent, whether in a duel, a war, or street battle, women did not belong on the field of honor. As the political struggle came to resemble a civil war, female images inevitably lost their evocative power.	26
Figure 9: Anonymous, Collection Histoire de France, 1834, Qb1 M 112445, Estampes, BNF.
The point is fundamental for understanding how the imagined positioning of women as opposed to their real location in public space could change so radically for the elite over the course of the July Monarchy. In practice, Frenchwomen held a remarkably visible place in Parisian political life throughout the period. Whenever the great political orators spoke on hotly debated issues, fashionable women filled the galleries of the legislative chambers. They also attended in great numbers highly politicized public events such as controversial plays, the annual painting salon, and inductions to the French Academy.56 Furthermore, all officially organized spectacles that celebrated national events presumed an audience of women.57 But as the metaphors governing the political imagery in the press turned more violent and as the political rhetoric of journalists in particular became both more intemperate and injurious for reputations, the code of masculine honor ensured that women as part of the political imaginary would drop from sight.	27
This manner of narrating the nation flatly rejected, of course, the official version of a king brought to power in July 1830 by the will of the entire populace of Paris, just as it would eventually eliminate any element in the national story for the queen to represent. Through 1835, in figuring the nation in public ceremonies, the king and queen refused to renounce the initial version of their symbolic role as a couple. Each year for national commemorations of the revolution, the uniformed king and his adult sons paraded on horseback through the streets of Paris between rows of national guardsmen and troops.58 Afterward, in the presence of the queen and with an audience of Parisian families, the king reviewed the guard and soldiers. The entire ceremony served as a metaphor for the unity of a nation composed of families protected against extremists and invasion by armed citizens and troops. However, after an attempted assassination of the king during the parade in 1835, which left seventeen men and one female spectator dead, that ritual ended. Targeted for assassination by a seemingly endless stream of fanatics and uncertain of the loyalty of the national guard, Louis-Philippe never again dared to parade across the capital.59 Henceforth, the royal family signaled its presence at celebrations of the founding of the monarchy from the safety of a balcony of the Tuileries Palace, or at military reviews in close proximity to it, in the first step of what would become a full retreat after 1842 from its aspirations to configure the nation through the royal family.	28
The only hope for recovering popular approval for the dynasty rested with the heir apparent, who by 1837 showed signs of successfully distancing his own persona from the dishonorable traits attributed to the king.60 Popular with the army in Algeria, willing, unlike his father, to risk war in Europe in a nationalist cause, personally attractive to both women and men, the new duc d'Orléans fit an ideal of masculinity accepted by the bourgeoisie across the political spectrum. Equally important, his father had excluded him from the Orléans children's private trust. With no legal claim to his father's private fortune and no money of his own, apart from what the legislature gave him, the duc d'Orléans could credibly assert a claim to serve the public interest only. Even though he, too, had many enemies, he apparently developed a genuinely popular following in Paris. After the arrival in 1837 of his bride, Hélène of Mecklenburg, which included a triumphantly enthusiastic welcome on the streets of Paris, the royal family had some chance of temporarily overcoming the fundamental problem of a bourgeois dynasty.61 Since the duc d'Orléans possessed the personal charisma necessary for the position that, under the constitution, he could claim by right of birth, his succession might have, in the short term, muted public opposition. That, in any case, was his parents' fondest dream. His accidental death in July 1842, by contrast, exposed the monarchy to the inherent contradiction between the dynastic ambitions of the Orléans family and the bourgeois familial values they sought to represent.	29
Henceforth, the logic of attacks on the person of the king placed Louis-Philippe in an impossible representational dilemma. Threat of assassination had driven him and his queen off the streets of Paris. His unpopular second son, together with his wife, could not replace them in the public's eye as the duc and duchesse d'Orléans might have done, although the legislature did recognize the eldest uncle's claim to serve as regent for his nephew should the need arise. Neither king nor legislature could envision a regency under the widowed Hélène in a political culture anchored in a universe of male combatants. In fact, the debate in the Chamber of Deputies on the issue revealed the hopelessness of either choice. As head of the government, François Guizot argued against a regency by the duchesse, warning: "The security of the State, the nature of our institutions, the energetic development of our public liberties, require that royal power remain in virile hands."62 Alphonse de Lamartine, the poet-deputy, who alone among his colleagues preferred the widowed duchesse to a son of Louis-Philippe, nonetheless admitted problems. "There is something contradictory," he observed, "between . . . the presence of a woman in power . . . [and] this pernicious maligning by the press."63 But if a female regent could expect an endless volley of salacious slurs, how would an unpopular son of an unpopular monarch fare? Lamartine once again exposed the paradox: "The dynasty that you so recently placed above a crater born of many revolutions must be . . . a dynasty on horseback . . . The passage from one reign to another will occur only under a vault of bayonets!"64 If this martial imagery echoed the language of the opposition press, it also resonated dangerously with the royal strategy for winning popularity for Louis-Philippe's sons through active military service. Therein lay another quandary for a monarch who sought popular acceptance under a bourgeois code of honor in postrevolutionary France.	30
The only honorable career open to a royal prince had always been military service. For the Orléans sons, who had to justify their privileged titles in a meritocratic age, honor required a distinguished military record, one recognized as such by other officers, their own troops, and the general public. The balancing act that this required for the four younger sons not only proved impossible to achieve but ultimately made them of dubious value and even pernicious for the monarchy. Their difficulties had multiple dimensions. Each prince necessarily held commands coveted by ambitious colleagues, since a titular post without authority had no value as a mark of honor. Furthermore, the king made sure, whenever French forces engaged an enemy, that one or more of his sons commanded forces, so as to give them the chance to show their mettle. Unfortunately, Louis-Philippe's determined pursuit of peace with other European powers limited these opportunities for ambitious officers, which only exacerbated envy of the princes.65 But peace with France's traditional enemies also made it difficult for a prince to prove himself in situations that mattered to the public. The long conquest of Algeria, where four of the king's sons served intermittently, did not arouse French nationalism. The opposition could, therefore, credibly claim that the only purpose of this war was to seek glory for the royal princes.66 But an even deeper ambiguity for the dynasty of using military service to acquire princely honor derived from the government's use of military units to control its urban populations, a practice that directly involved a prince on more than one occasion quelling a revolt, if only by riding in uniform and on horseback through contested areas. At least one son always remained in France, close to Paris and the king for just that purpose.67 Thus, in 1847, when Louis-Philippe commissioned Horace Vernet to paint an official portrait of the dynasty that presented king and sons mounted on energetic horses outside the national museum at Versailles, which Louis-Philippe had founded to celebrate French glory, the result garbled the intended message.68 (See Figure 10.) Rather than a dynasty in service to the nation, a hostile public could just as easily perceive in such a martial portrait men who would stop at nothing to protect their family.69	31
Figure 10: Anonymous lithograph of Horace Vernet's painting "Louis-Philippe and His Sons Riding Out from the Château of Versailles," Collection Histoire de France, C 23433, Estampes, BNF.
The possibility for a malicious reading of the royal family's motives germinated insidiously in the press throughout the 1840s. Restrained by law from direct attacks on members of the royal family, the opposition press managed all the same to project a violent image of an avaricious king ready to fleece the nation and sacrifice its military honor to advance his own dynastic interests. Three occasions early in the 1840s offered his enemies an opportunity to solidify that reputation. The first arose when the Chamber of Deputies refused, despite Louis-Philippe's insistence, to dower his second son (dotation) at the time of his marriage, a refusal that both the king and opposition understood as an attack on his personal honor that also implied his greed. A second chance for opponents to impugn the monarch's honor developed when the government decided in 1840 to erect a wall around Paris and place several military garrisons in the vicinity to protect the capital against a possible invasion.70 The opposition press painted the real purpose of the plan as a plot to defend the regime against revolts in Paris. At the height of this hyperbolic battle, another partisan incident occurred that seemed, if not to confirm the duplicity of the king, at least to recognize his reputation for mendacity as a fact. A criminal court acquitted editors of five opposition papers charged with publishing counterfeit letters attributed to the king. The letters were written to show his overriding goal in foreign and domestic policies to be his own survival. Amazingly, the defense persuaded the court that since some of the letters had been published in England in the 1830s with no official protest, the accused journalists had not published false documents knowingly.71 The verdict itself confirmed the success of the long and relentless press campaign to malign the character of the king. Thus, on March 14, 1840, when the celebrated actor Frédérick Lemaître, starring in a new play based on Honoré de Balzac's famous fictional criminal, Vautrin, made every effort to copy the gestures and voice of the real master criminal, Eugène-François Vidocq, and then in the final act appeared in one of Vautrin's many disguises with the toupee and sideburns of Louis-Philippe, the audience easily interpreted the insulting message. So did the heir apparent, who, having attended the play's premiere, promptly left the royal box.72	32
Still more treacherous than personal attacks on the king's integrity was a story of contemporary moral decay that created the impression in the 1840s of a whole society of "bourgeois" hypocrites, with the monarch only the most prominent example.73 In the opposition press, the decade opened with a rash of social satires called physiologies, a genre that dated to the 1820s but suddenly appeared in great profusion in the early 1840s. The authors of these lampoons specialized in identifying social types to mock. When, therefore, three that appeared in 1841 and 1842, Physiology of the Umbrella, Physiology of the Jokester, and Physiology of Robert-Macaire, clearly targeted the king, his caricatured persona became the starting point for commenting on like-minded contemporaries with the same reprehensible traits.74 From a personal vendetta, attacks against the king mushroomed into a condemnation of the social universe he purportedly embodied. The connection is important for understanding the fragility of the regime in the 1840s and the ease with which the opposition continued to undermine the monarchy without attacking it directly. Daumier's caricatures ridiculing the hypocrisy of contemporary social mores in "respectable" households no longer needed to point to Louis-Philippe for their political effect. Republican papers achieved the same result by filling their columns for incidental news items (faits divers) with stories about police spies, white-collar crimes, or murders in "respectable" families.75 Consequently, in 1846 and 1847, when scandals involving graft, murder, and suicide engulfed three peers and a member of the Chamber of Deputies, even supporters of the regime acknowledged that the aftershocks might bring the monarchy down.76	33
More than anyone, Louis-Philippe could not escape the tarring effect of a perception perpetrated in the opposition press that behind all claims by powerful men to speak for public interest lay pecuniary gain. His detractors had long since destroyed his reputation with respect to money. After February 1848, when caricaturists were again at liberty to mock the royal family, the theme of avarice became a favorite visual device. Several prints imagined Louis-Philippe making off to England carrying sacks of money.77 One lithograph depicted the exiled king sitting on his treasure dressed as a mountebank with his four sons and two grandsons balanced on his shoulders as if to imply that greed had corrupted the entire male line of the dynasty and all they wanted from the throne was to enrich themselves.78 (See Figure 11.)	34
Figure 11: Artist unknown, Imprimerie Lemercier, Paris, "Parade par le fameux Guizotin" (Parade by the Famous Clown Guizot). François Guizot was Louis-Philippe's unpopular First Minister, 1840–1848. Collection de Vinck, 1848, P 31641, Estampes, BNF.
A telling feature of caricatures that postdate the revolution, however, especially by comparison with those that mocked the exiled Bourbons nearly two decades earlier, is the absence of any royal women. This erasure, far from incidental, provides a vital clue to both how the Orléans royal family presented itself in the closing decade of the regime and how the masculinization of the imaginary universe that enclosed the monarchy worked to undermine it. The progressive eclipse of Marie-Amélie in public life, noticeable as early as 1835 and conspicuous in the 1840s, has received little attention from historians. Those who note the queen's retreat into a domestic realm generally attribute it to personal preference.79 A better reading would give due credit to Louis-Philippe's well-established sensitivity to his own milieu and recognize the difficulty in the last years of the July Monarchy of finding any persona for a royal wife or mother to enact without incurring criticism.	35
Once the king could no longer show himself in Paris, few occasions arose for the queen to perform her wifely role of spectator for national events, apart from her yearly arrival in a closed carriage for the royal opening of the legislature. In her role of royal mother, she appeared in the capital on three state occasions between 1837 and 1841: first to accompany Hélène on her entry into Paris, then to welcome her third son back from his mission to St. Helena to retrieve Napoleon's ashes, and, lastly, to attend the baptism at Nôtre Dame Cathedral of the grandson expected one day to assume the throne.80 After the death of the duc d'Orléans in 1842, however, circumstances for that performance did not recur, and the role lost any public meaning. Only as hostess at the court did she continue to carry on an active ceremonial life, though one muted in the press in the 1840s for lack of public interest in a household that the general public had come to see as private in its primary concerns. Widespread indifference toward court occasions accounts in part for the queen's invisibility in those years.81	36
Equally important, however, was the scrupulously apolitical public image that she crafted for herself as wife and mother, even though, within the family, certainly her children and almost certainly the king confided their opinions to her constantly.82 In 1844, when Louis-Philippe made an unprecedented royal visit to England at Queen Victoria's request, in keeping with her apolitical persona Marie-Amélie stayed home to care for grandchildren.83 The royal couple aligned themselves astutely by such means with a postrevolutionary bourgeois culture that made public life a masculine concern, while the queen avoided any public controversy that would have dishonored her and, thereby, brought dishonor on her family. But what they could not escape were the dangers inherent in a masculine profile for the family captured in the caricature of all the Orléans princes as covetous mountebanks like their father and, in Lamartine's trenchant expression, "a dynasty on horseback."	37
This article set out to show the futility of efforts to legitimize any monarchy in postrevolutionary France, given its meritocratic ethos, the elite's notion of honor, and the widely shared opinion that self-interest fueled ambition in public life. Summarized briefly, the problems for the house of Orléans come to three. First, dynasticism necessarily conflicted with the principle enshrined by the revolution that public honors ought to depend on individual merit, a principle reclaimed under the July Monarchy with the elimination of all inheritable offices except the throne. Consequently, a popular king could no more guarantee an uncontested throne for his offspring than could an unpopular one. In theory, any candidate to the throne had to prove he merited the honor, and that meant a charismatic father might be even more difficult to succeed than a king who came to be despised like Louis-Philippe. As heir to the throne, the duc d'Orléans actually gained in public favor by disputing policies of his father.84 The elite's complex notion of honor made his position extremely tricky, though. He had to look like a defender of the public interest by disagreeing with his purportedly avaricious and pusillanimous father. But, as a son, he had to show respect for his father or risk his own and the Orléans family honor. To prove his honorability as a potential king required both filial obedience and filial opposition. Near the end of his life, the duc d'Orléans showed signs of bringing off that delicate balancing act, at least in the political short run. After his death, the unpopularity of Louis-Philippe's second son foreclosed any such transitory solution to the contradictions of dynasticism in postrevolutionary France.	38
A second dilemma for the monarchy concerned gendered taboos affecting honor. Throughout the July Monarchy, caricatures targeting the king and royal family, like their own perpetual self-invention, attest to the importance of these taboos to symbolic politics. They also imply ambiguity, however, in the representative value of royal women, since a queen and her daughters stood for the private sphere embedded in the public. That did not preclude their usefulness on some occasions, such as a national festival. Nor could the opposition press attack them as long as neither sexual improprieties nor too great an interest in politics turned them into legitimate targets. The men responsible for such an outrage would have dishonored themselves by such an act. Nonetheless, the honorability of royal women, like that of any woman, was a purely private matter. Nothing they did brought either honor or dishonor on the nation, only on their family. In matters of representation, therefore, when a monarch enjoyed popular sympathy, royal women could mirror those sentiments by applauding their men in public. But when a monarch was unpopular, too visible a presence of a wife or daughter served as a reminder to the public of the private interests of the royal family. The relative invisibility of the Orléans women in the 1840s and, above all, of the widow of the duc d'Orléans and the queen herself indicates the clarity with which all members of the family understood their problem, even though their disappearance could not solve it.85	39
The final intractable obstacle to legitimizing the monarchy derived from cynical readings by the elite of their own contemporaries' motives. An imagined world where selfish men competed with each other to advance themselves and the interests of their families made it exceedingly difficult for anyone to build a reputation for pursuing public interest only. For the king, the fractured nature of political loyalties after 1830 rendered it impossible, but so did his activism as a ruler. Political historians have spent much energy analyzing Louis-Philippe's policies to either justify or vilify him on that basis. Pierre Rosanvallon set that debate aside by claiming that the king's fundamental vulnerability had as much to do with the lack of any theoretical justification for a king as it did with any particular policies. I would prefer to shift the argument once again not back to the specifics of Louis-Philippe's politics, since his opponents would have maligned him on their account no matter what, but to the sense of personal honor that drove him into an activist role in the first place. The problem lay once again at the intersection of a meritocratic ethos and notions of honor shared by the elite. If Frenchmen in the elite were deeply concerned about their honor, and public honor depended on demonstrating that one merited the honors that one held, how much more important might that have been for Louis-Philippe, a prince whom Legitimists alleged had connived to usurp the Bourbon throne? His honorability, if only to himself, his family, and his supporters, depended on proving his indispensability as king.86 Otherwise, his presence on the throne dishonored him. Therein lies the paradox. A sense of honor impelled him to take charge, but in doing so, he only made it easier for his enemies to place him at the center of the depravity that they imagined all around them.	40
Nevertheless, the nature of the depravity of Louis-Philippe and his regime in the imaginings of the regime's opponents differed from one social milieu to another in the revolutionary crisis of 1848. The point is crucial for understanding representations in the republican press of the violent incident that precipitated the popular insurrection and destroyed the monarchy. For what those images leave out suggests a fundamental difference between the universe of male combatants that the elite constructed over the course of the July Monarchy to represent its own political battles and the political imaginary of the people of Paris that brought them in fury to the barricades.	41
By all accounts, popular agitation over the government's refusal to permit a political banquet in support of electoral reform was fizzling out on the streets of Paris on February 23, until a violent incident in which troops fired into a mixed crowd of spectators outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs turned a political crisis into a revolt.87 Intent on that result, several men in workers' smocks piled the bodies of the victims onto a cart to haul around the city through the night. To call the populace to insurrection, according to the contemporary testimony of the historian Daniel Stern, they repeatedly lifted the grisly body of a young woman to the torchlight crying, "Vengeance . . . They're slaughtering the people!"88 Once laid out with the rest of the bodies on the Place de la Bastille, again in Stern's account, the sight of this female corpse electrified the populace.89 Just as in July of 1830, it seems, the Parisian populace placed a dead woman at the center of their own version of the iniquities of the regime that justified rebellion. This time, however, the republican press refused to use that visual aid to account for popular revenge. Only two of the nine illustrations of the cart of cadavers located in the print collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France or that I discovered in other contemporary sources include a woman's corpse. The caption on one of them reads, "Arm yourselves, they are killing our brothers!"90 The other, an English lithograph, printed in London with an English text and autographed with the signature "H. J. in Paris, 1848," alone among all nine illustrations aligned the bodies side by side with a lifeless female in the front, just the way Daniel Stern described them.91 The rest, if they included a woman at all, depicted her as an anguished spectator, usually with a child. Four of the nine simply eliminated women altogether.92 (See Figure 12.)	42
Figure 12: Design and lithograph by A. Provost, "Journée du mercredi 23 février" (Wednesday, the 23rd of February). The caption reads: "The dead, fallen in front of the Ministry of F